The Pencil Guy: Hourann's illogical blog

Mountain-rescue PM!

Thursday 14 August 2008 at 4:17 pm
  • I wish our prime minister had stories like this. I mean, speaking Mandarin is pretty cool, but going mountaineering is undoubtedly more awesome.
  • Meanwhile, leave it to an election campaign to convince Jim McGinty that it’d be prudent to keep a hospital ER in the middle of the city!
  • Also: this post comes to you from Hong Kong airport, where I’m watching a Bloomberg morning report (OMG will the Chinese market drop when the Olympics end?). In between segments there are painfully dry ads from an Indonesian government investment authority; apparently their country is all about pro-business rule of law! If that’s true, it’d be a nice change
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Howard-isms are popping up everywhere!

Wednesday 14 November 2007 at 11:31 pm
  • There was a column in last Friday’s South China Morning Post responding to the Chinese prime minister’s claim that the economy here has had years of strong growth, and therefore his economic policy is awesome and can’t be faulted. This sounds strangely familiar! And as the column put it, just because we know A equals B doesn’t therefore mean X equals Y …
  • And yes, the Latham story died down and we’re back to the same-old of throwing a million dollars or so here, a billion or so there, and who really cares about keeping track of these expenses anymore?
  • Team Howard, meanwhile, seem intent on asserting that this election is about the future. I’m not convinced of that, and I doubt the punter on the street could ever be convinced. Is this really the best that Liberal strategists can come up with — after all, aren’t all of the Ruddster’s big policies about the future too?
  • I am missing this whole saga with BHP and Rio, which is a shame because it sounds mighty funny. “You’re undervaluing our company!” “No, you’re undervaluing our company!” … or something to that effect.
  • Finally I doubt there’ll have been much coverage in Australia of the successful float of Alibaba, the largest e-commerce venture in China (and one of the world’s largest). I was even tempted to write about a new Internet boom in Asia, except that the IPO happened alongside a massive fall on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Markets here behave in their own very strange ways …
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